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From: schoenbergcommercial
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  • Wonderful. And including The Rite was idiotic.

  • Where can I get this CD?

  • Pierrot Lunaire isn't 12-tone (Yes I realize I'm picking hairs)

  • Then again neither is Rite... ehhh... kinda fail come to think of it.

  • @texancomposer Neither are most of the other pieces heard on the video... which makes it all the more funny :D

  • I'm still waiting for the second album, with all the songs from my childhood, like "Survivor of Warsaw."

  • Most of the music they use for this "commercial", if not all of it, is not twelve tone :-S... Besides the title, this is very funny :-D.

  • @EdiEllerymissing There a few exceptions (Webern's Symphonie, Berg's violin concerto etc.), but you're right, most of them are not.

  • twelve-tone music is ugliness-beauty. pop-music is beauty-ugliness.

  • @elgaed69 elgaed69 is ugliness-ugliness.

  • @fontinau fontinau is from the USA

  • @elgaed69 elgaed thinks "from the USA" constitutes a comeback.

  • @fontinau I live in the USA. When it comes to music, yeah being from the USA is a major disadvantage.

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  • @elgaed69 Being from the USA is an even bigger disadvantage with regard to language.

  • Ironically, the part they play here from "Lulu" is from the end of act III, which was completed after Berg died.

  • Someone mentioned that the 2nd Viennese sound has been popularized by "movie soundtracks, etc". But to my knowledge, there is no "etc". Movie soundtracks are the full extent of the popularization. And we're talking about decades-old soundtracks, I suspect. And then there's the Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, Cage, Babbitt train-wreck. It's a wonder that we had a Schnittke to enjoy afterward. The rest is silence.

  • I like this music, but it failed publicly because of lack of balance. In music from the common practice period, there was more or less a balance between dissonance and consonance. Here the latter left out. Schoenberg himself admonished his students not to follow him, but to go back, and find something new in the old.

  • I just love this.  I really do.

  • Alban Berg never finished Lulu?

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  • fffFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU­UUUUUuuuuuuuuuuu........!!!!

  • When Dada lost its smile.

  • Ùnglãublich_lÉÚte_sûcht_mÀl_nâ­ch:_olikohle_ãÜf_göÒglÉ_vÔll_g­êIl

  • Herrlich.

  • The funny thing is-I think most people wouldn't consider these musical pieces "shocking" or "random" sounding anymore, since the style of the second viennese school has found it's way in the head of the popular audience through movie soundtracks etc.

    People are now able to imagine what Schönberg, Berg and Webern were aiming for with their music, the intended expression became universally clearer as the years passed by. It's gonna be the same with 50/60's serialism and Elliott Carter soon.

  • @playingmusiconmars : I agree that this kind of music lives on in movie soundtracks. But then again stuff like this is only used to express madness, terror and fear - which tells a lot about the music and the people who listen to it.

    Schoenberg´s music exists for 100 years now and still has failed to reach a major audience, After all this time even his die-hard fans should admit that his approach has failed.

  • @VienneseDelights I am sorry to contradict you. It has not failed. He proved his point, he followed his path. It failed commercially, but that is not it's point, so in the end it did not fail. Do you think Berthoven walked around Vienna thinking how much money he could make? No, he wrote some stuff commercially, I am sure. But so did Schoenberg... Schrammelmusik. He arranged Viennese waltzes.

  • @playingmusiconmars I have never thought about that. Its an interesting thought! Its hard for me to imagine how it feels like to be commonly tone deaf, but my experience with most people is still, that whenever they are exposed to atonal music, they dont seem to like it.

  • "And who could forget this horrible moment in twelve-tone enjoyment?" *vacuum cleaner* lol

  • The International Mathias Bamert Society!!!!! This was from WCLV-FMs Saturday night Show. MB was Cleve Orch's resident conductor late 60s/early 70s. The voiceover is WCLV's Robert Conrad.

  • You do realize most of those compositions weren't twelve tone compositions, right?

  • 2:12 Was that Rowdy Roddy Piper????

  • _The Rite of Spring_ was only in there to coincide with that six-gun shooter...... This is about the funniest classical music parody I've seen!

  • I don't know if that's supposed to be taken as a slight towards Raff or not. He's better than many more famous composers.

  • this is superLOL!!! xD xD

  • @cmontheplane and @ didgeboy287 I think they used one of Stravinsky's non-serial works on purpose because they wanted a bunch of dramatic notes and they wanted to get fictional 12-tone fans mad when Stravinsky was on there and it wasn't even one of his serial works. But that's just my opinion.

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  • I love all of it. The actual music. The making fun of the music. The fighting over the making fun of the music.

  • to all naysayers of this wonderful music, i think even the most conservative among you will admit that Cher has done far more damage to modern music that The Second Viennese School ever could have.

    also, hilarious

  • I'd still rather listen to this that commercial pop radio!!!

  • This is so sarcastic... Love it!!! xD

  • sorry to be a nerd but Bergs 3 pieces for Orch isn't twelve tone

  • Stravinkys Sacre isn't 12-tone either, in fact it's a decade before it all began (1913)

    Nevertheless cool stuff.

  • La mediocridad estadounidense burlándose de la cultura europea...

  • This is awesome.

  • Wow! I've got to get this LP! All the music I haven't listened to since my collegiate music major days 34 years ago. Can't wait to not listen to them again!

  • Should have used "Requiem Canticles" instead of "Rite of Spring!"

  • @cmontheplane It's a shame to throw in such a great piece as Rite of Spring with the 12 tone works.

  • It was an April fools joke made with Matthias Bamert when he was in Cleveland!

  • hilarious! Was this video really made by the asc? good sense of humor.

  • "and a guest appearance from Igor Stravinski!"

  • 'By the same Geniie' Hahahaha!

  • Never got to see the visuals with this commercial! Cool!

  • Ha ha...nice

  • this delights me to no end!

  • Zwölftonmusik wurde nicht geschrieben um lustig zu sein ihr Ignoranten.

  • @herbertsa : Genau. Das ist ernst. Richtig ernst. Echte, ernste E-Musik.

    (*g)

  • Die schönsten Twölftonmusik-Hits - jetzt auf einer LP....

  • This is really funny! OK, not all of the music played is 12-tone, some of it is atonal. But its still funny!

  • lol!

  • Where can we order?

  • Someday this may actually come to pass. I will await seeing the complete Viennese School at Costco, in the meantime.

  • PURE GENIUS!

  • Bello.

  • Seems like this was made by a twelve-tone listener, but the snipe at Berg at 1:48 was funny and harsh! "Virtuosity in violin playing"...(ensuing clip has Violin playing all the open strings slowly, from bottom to top and back)

  • @kentokhromatic

    Actually the open strings is from the beginning of the Berg Violin Concerto.

  • Amusing, very, but !!!!!!

  • Robert Conrad of WCLV was a genius of classical music humor. Can you imagine people tuning in to listen to a pledge drive, yet that's what they did! I loved that station.

  • (Phone tree for Classical Music, heard at the beginning of a PDQ Bach record:)

    "...You've got to be kidding. You have selected Arnold Schoenberg. Please select a composer whose music you actually like."

    (Just what I need, my daily dose of psychosis.)

  • THIS WAS AWESOME!

  • That might be one of the funniest things I have ever seen!

  • Brilliant! Particularly love the surprise visit from Stravinsky - and the accompanying visual!

  • Which part of "Lulu" is that from?

  • @jookyle This is from Act III, final scene, the moment when Jack the Ripper kills Lulu

  • @jookyle

    Lulu's murder by Jack the Ripper

  • rowdy roddy piper!!

  • Arnie Schönberg?

  • "Alban, Arnold and Anton: three of the greatest composers since Joachim Raff." LMAO!

  • and "International Matthias Bamert Society"! LOL

  • @TheCentaur23 I think it's Rachmaninoff..

  • Genial! Des Scheiber'l muss ich mir unbedingt holen. Die is' halt au so super zum Abtänzen.

  • uhmhat einer bock bissl zu quatschn ihr werdets warscheinlich nicht bereuen ^^

  • This is absolutely hilarious! I love the way they skewer the original serialists here (and I'm actually a pretty big fan of Schoenberg, Berg & Webern, etc.). 5 stars!

  • Shucks - I wish I'd known about this wonderful LP in time for Valentine's Day. It's hard to imagine a more fittingly romantic gift.

  • Sexy tunes! :-P

  • "pretonal music"? I know of no examples of this, and suspect there is not & never has been any such thing

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  • @, e.g., Jazzyful2 -- "Tonality" in no way presupposes chords or "progressions" thereof. Essentially homophonic musics such as Indian and Arab are *tonal*. Different notes of the scale in force don't have to be sounded simultaneously to establish different tonal centers within the scale; melody suffices. The oldest surviving and confirmed instruments are flutes of various sorts, and they seem to be tuned to 5-, 6- and 7-tone scales. Some are still playable.

  • I can't seem to find the response that yours is directed at, but maybe that person means music before functional harmony (ex. Plainchant, Organum, etc.) and/or modal music. Using the term pretonal isn't exactly as idiotic as you make it seem.

  • Search for "pretonal" on this page, you'll find it. Maybe I replied to a straw man and the word was used as you suggest -- pre-functional-harmony, music that sounds good (/is conceivable) on instruments in non-tempered tuning. But even if the term is meant narrowly I think it's inappropriate, as it suggests the whole realm of Western self-congratulatory psuedo-scientific put-downs -- "pre-logical", "pre-literate", and so on. Peace y'all.

  • lol!

  • splendidly absurd

  • The problem is that there is no central theory of atonal harmony to this day. In practice, the way how a tone row is used is motivated by the intended harmony.

  • Central Theories of any kind of harmony always come on the heels of the people who write music. The rules come by inference, and did not exist for the composer. When music sounds great, other people naturally want to figure out why, so making theories or rules seems the way...Our last century contained so many fragmented viewpoints in all kinds of music, it follows that there is no one central theory of atonal harmony.

  • Theories mostly are made from Musicologist out of what Musicians practically do. What I've meant was, that the point of harmony was unfortunately very sparse in the focus of musicologist in the 20th century. For example, you can read tons of analysis about,works using twelvetone rows, which do not contain a single word about harmony. And this let people think, it wasn't important or didn't exist. But of course it was still a very important for writing music.

  • @BenMcCormack91: Your opinion does't interest me at all.

    Second Viennese School rules!!!

  • @johnstrieder I don't dislike it. I just think it's only part of music theory. I still like how people gave me thumbs-down when I said that tonal music is still good. As if by liking tonal music, I am automatically against atonal...

  • Hi sorry, I think I answered rvaughanwilliams1988. But you've written a lot tendencious stuff here. Personally I like atonal music much more than tonal music, and I'm not the only one :)

  • Your point is valid. My point is just that atonal music is ultimately something that comes from tonal music. Most (tonal) music is, at its heart, based on fundamental ideas of music. The pentatonic scale, for example, is pretty much universal across all cultures.

    Atonality (knowingly) defies these principles. It is enjoyable - for some more than for others - but because it defies these principles, I don't think it is the next step in musical evolution but merely another branch.

  • That's just your opinion. Tonal music is just a little island of 300 years in western europe. There are results of music research, that conditioning is everything, and most of those "fundamental ideas" do not exist. Besides all that, I don't understand your motivation making so many posts about this under a video with atonal music. Why don't you enjoy your tonal music and be happy with that?

  • You're ignoring a good half of what I said. I LIKE atonal music - I've said it several times, and you still don't seem to get it. My discussion of tonality also acknowledged it was a recent Western convention. I was referring to only a few elements - the pentatonic scale being the major one - that are more widespread.

    If you're going to take small elements of what I say and hear them out of context, of course it'll sound like I'm assaulting you.

  • Ok ;) I was refering to Sentences like "Atonality (knowingly) defies these principles [fundamental ideas of music]." That all sounds so negative! For me the point of Atonality is not being against Tonality, but explore new possibilites and freedom.

  • Okay; that makes sense. Reworded - I see atonality as part of musical evolution. We had pretonal music, then we had tonality, then chromaticism, then atonality. Within all such tonal densities, there is always plenty of potential. Atonality is another addition to our "arsenal" of potential tonalities, and I welcome it: Composers can create pieces that use atonality, or a density somewhere between the tonal and the atonal. It just adds to our potential, musically. I'd be dumb to ignore it.

  • Good :D

  • 300 years? Don't think so.

  • @johnnylifelive: Okay, maybe 300 years are too much ;) And of course only in western-europe.

  • Put simply, atonality is a subversion of what we know. And there is room for such things: A movie with a sad ending, a story with a logic that defies what we expect. Abstract art is beautiful, but it's different. The ability to create cubist works is impressive and interesting, but ultimately, the average eye will relate more easily to a realistic landscape. It is not that one is more or less sophisticated. It is just that one appeals to natural feelings, and one knowingly defies them.

  • Oh geez, not this kitsch-mongering "know-it-all" kid again. I have no words for your RIDICULOUS comments. Stop searching atonal videos and commenting with your retarded 2-cents. Nobody cares what someone who arranged a fucking Counting Crows song has to say.

    Also, the singer for that terrible band comes into my girlfriends work, and he's a douche.

  • @saladshootavvv For the record, I've been finding myself pressing "discard" much more frequently...

    In other words, yes, I actually agree with your negative opinion of me, and will act accordingly. No, I'm not being sarcastic. I don't act like that in real life, so might as well not online.

  • Why cut it there? It just got to the good part of The Rite of Spring!

  • 2.00: "Who could forget this colourful moment in 12-tone enjoyment?"

    Genius!

  • Wow I wish this compilation actually existed

  • alban arnold....and anton

  • I love the Stravinsky intro

  • "It's music that works whether you can analyze it or not."

    You have really gotten to the root of the issue there. Tonality works even if you don't understand how.

  • 2:03 "Or this tender, loving passage in Alban's unfinished opera, 'Lulu'?"

  • @thinedoor2

    This one is my best favorite!!!! I also like the Stravinsky selection comes right after. Good match!!!!!

    Also the "Romantic movement" and the open strings violin concerto!

  • This is really a VERY funny compilation. It's just sad that it echoes the opinion of so many. And I actually DO go around humming Schonberg's (et al) tunes. His music is VERY tuneful, expressive, and often quite (intentionally) humorous as well!

  • Of course, it's not Second Vienese music being mocked here, but people whose musical sophistication begins and ends with the Monkees

  • I think it's subtler than that. The humor is right on the edge, making fun of the entire situation. That's why it's so funny. I almost busted a gut laughing. It is a fact that atonal music is used a lot in soundtracks for horror films.

  • HA. HA.

  • This is a clip put together (I believe) by Robert Conrad of WCLV FM Cleveland. His voice is on the clip (He's the "voice" of The Cleveland Orchestra), and Matthias Bamert, of The Matthias Bamert Society, was an assistant conductor in Cleveland. He also was director of the Lucerne Festival for a time.

  • It's poignant watching this to recall Schoenberg's wish/hope/prediction that 50 years hence his

    atonal/12-tone melodies would be hummed by the average music lover as readily as Tchaikovsky's--

    was the failure of his vision in this case less owing to excess of (however self-serving) optimism than to

    the--for Schoenberg unimaginable-- relentless (if adorable) dumbing-down of postmodern musical

    culture?

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  • I'll give you an A for the concept and an A+ for all the work that went into this baby. Holy cow!

  • Hahaha, this is so funny :D

    I'm a composer myself and I wonder if anyone will ever mock my music like this in the future. I'd laugh my ass off if they would xD

  • sick

    david liebman in his master class this summer had a sax player improvise freely over a schoenberg piano piece--like a 12tone aebersold playalong

  • This is the best thing I have seen EVER. the music nerd in me just gazummed in laughter

  • I am with the person who says that this is very funny, but loves the music.

    Just for the record, Schönberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" is not a twelve-tone piece.

  • And it is not the only not-dodecaphonic piece heard in the commercial - if I recall correctly, most of them are not. Still it is a very funny video. And I must say that I quite a often hum or whistle atonal melodies - Webern had a remarkable understanding of melodies and his atonal works are full of catchy motifs.

  • @lendallpitts good shout.

  • @lendallpitts It is a twelve-tone piece, it's just not 12-tone serialism.

  • I just wet myself!

  • Hilarious video! But I do love most of this music.

  • Where do I buy it?

  • This is fantastic . Who made it?

  • Oh my goodness... Loving the dancing at 0:44

  • Thanks to Jan in Ottawa for sending (to Rob, then me).

    I'm waiting for the 123-tone scale, but I think I'm already using it (counting all the flat and sharp notes I play ...).

  • This is great!

  • HAHA i love this so much

  • I lold. Seriously though, Pierrot Lunaire, good stuff. Favorite song cycle of all time. If I were a woman, and a soprano, I would sing nothing else.

  • of course you mean: "I would speak nothing else.". Right?

  • I amend my statement. I would Sprechstimme nothing else.

  • This is so great. Maybe I'm just a nerd. Berg's concerto (other than just the beginning) is not easy certainly, but it is a funny choice to call "virtuoso" violin writing (5th's up and down the strings).

  • Ha! I was thinking that exact same thing!

  • That was hilarious. But I think they should have used a serial piece of Stravinsky and not Le Sacre.

  • "Arnie Schoenberg"... LOL

  • LOL. So that's why Jack Nicholson's charater in "The Shining" lost it. Berg and Schonberg.

  • Brilliant! LOL.

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  • Though in the hands of fools, it loses its charm quickly.

  • weird

    ive got to think about

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  • ok.. interesting advertising

  • LOL. Very Interesting!

  • Awesome!

  • So what the fuck is this?

  • Hilarious?

  • That was mean...or funny and mean...or just funny. :)

  • THIS IS AWESOME AND HILLLAAAAAARIOUS

    thats the slowest ive ever heard the 11/4 bar from rite of spring...

  • this is great: who put it together

  • I cannot tell if this is in good humor or insidious vitriol. Regardless, Arnold Schoenberg and his pupils are all geniuses and we still owe them great respect to their influence.

  • If you think that there could be "insidious vitriol" in this lovingly put together spoof, then you haven't the soul to discourse on who is a genius; that you could even think of a letter-to-the-editor farrago of words, such as "insidious vitriol," proves that you deserve no respect when you demand respect from others.

    i

  • say, wot?

  • HAHAHAHA the violin concerto excerpt on open strings

  • So funny...

  • I love the Webern part at 0:43.

  • ahaha))) I love the part when they say sing it in the shower)))

  • I must warn others against this release, the presentation is seriously lacking for the meager 4-page 'booklet' didn't include the choreography for the stupendous Webern symphony dance.

  • The only exception was Rite of Spring there. But... being as good as it is... you can leave it there. :)

    Great work!

  • brilliant!!

  • LOLOLOLOLOL

  • this just made my day